C.S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis — known as "Jack" to friends and family — was born into a middle-class Protestant family in Belfast in 1898. The early death of his mother from cancer in 1908, when Lewis was nine, marked the first of several losses that would later shape his theology of suffering. He and his older brother Warren ("Warnie") were close throughout life and lived together at The Kilns near Oxford from 1930 onwards. Educated first by tutors, then at boarding schools he disliked intensely, Lewis flourished under the private mentorship of W.T. Kirkpatrick — the rigorous logician he later called "The Great Knock." He won a scholarship to University College, Oxford in 1916, interrupted by service as an officer in the Somerset Light Infantry; he was wounded by friendly fire at the Battle of Arras in April 1918. Returning to Oxford, he took three First-class degrees and in 1925 was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College, where he taught English literature for almost three decades. By his early twenties Lewis was an atheist, persuaded that the universe was meaningless and that all religion was wish-fulfilment. Long conversations with J.R.R. Tolkien, Hugo Dyson, and Owen Barfield, alongside his reading of George MacDonald and G.K. Chesterton, gradually undermined his materialism. He came to theism in 1930 and to Christianity in 1931, describing himself as "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." His first major literary success was The Allegory of Love (1936), which won the Hawthornden Prize. During the Second World War the BBC asked him to give radio talks on Christian belief; the broadcasts were collected as Mere Christianity (1952), making him one of the most widely read Christian writers in the English-speaking world. The Screwtape Letters (1942) — a satirical correspondence between a senior demon and his apprentice — put him on the cover of Time magazine in 1947. With Tolkien and other Oxford writers he formed the Inklings — an informal literary circle that met for nearly two decades at Magdalen College and the Eagle and Child pub. Both The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia were shaped in these meetings. The seven Narnia novels appeared between 1950 and 1956. In 1954 Lewis accepted a Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge. Late in life he married the American writer Joy Davidman. Her death from cancer in 1960 produced A Grief Observed (1961), perhaps the rawest of his books. Lewis died at The Kilns on 22 November 1963 — the same afternoon as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which overshadowed his passing in the news of the day. C.S. Lewis lived 1898 – 1963.